The massive AWS outage on October 20, 2025 affected thousands of companies and millions of users, highlighting how much of the internet depends on a few cloud providers. Outages like this are a reminder that single-cloud setups carry real risks, especially as AI workloads and digital services scale. Multi-cloud strategies are becoming essential, spreading workloads across providers to improve resilience and foster healthy competition.

AI isn’t a bubble like 1999… There’s hype at the edges, but the core is built on real profits, real adoption, and disciplined investment, mostly from big tech and infrastructure rather than speculation.

Geoffrey Hinton’s breakthroughs in deep neural networks, especially convolutional nets like AlexNet, triggered the modern AI revolution by proving that large models trained on massive datasets can outperform traditional methods. He later became one of AI’s loudest warning voices, raising concerns about misuse, job displacement, and loss of control. But from a Ventures Edge perspective, we remain optimistic: history (and Jevons’ Paradox) suggests that more efficient AI will expand, not shrink, economic opportunity, creating new industries, not just automating old ones.

A series of large, interlinked deals between NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Oracle has raised questions about circular financing in AI. Some view it as inflated growth built on mutual dependence, while others see it as a practical way to fund and scale the infrastructure behind today’s AI expansion.

Artificial intelligence has become astonishingly good at perception. It can describe a photo, summarize a document, and even generate a symphony of pixels from a sentence. The models behind these feats (convolutional networks, transformers, diffusion systems) have mastered how to recognize patterns. They see, they mimic, they predict. But they do not yet understand.

A sudden $100,000 fee on H-1B visas jolted the U.S. tech market, sending companies scrambling and narrowing access to global talent. Startups fear higher burn and thinner pipelines as founders and engineers consider building elsewhere. Canada and other countries are moving to attract these workers, turning U.S. restrictions into their opportunity.

Apple has shoveled $704B into buybacks over the last decade, clear signal it’s now an EPS-first incumbent, not a moonshot machine. “Apple Intelligence” is incremental, Siri 2.0 slipped to 2026, and Siri punts tough queries to ChatGPT while Google/Samsung push true AI-first phones. Cash returns run ~11× R&D+capex, propping EPS as innovation feels like hardware refreshes. Unless Apple aggressively ramps product/capex and ships a private, on-device assistant that beats rivals, it risks settling into integrator status rather than originator in the AI era.

The US has never had a sovereign wealth fund, but that may be about to change. Instead of relying on oil revenues or trade surpluses like Norway or Singapore, the American version is being seeded through equity stakes in industrial projects and assets seized by law enforcement. If successful, it could function more like a national endowment—turning today’s subsidies and windfalls into long-term capital with major implications for venture funds as potential LPs.

In 2025, venture-backed IPOs in North America surged, with 13 U.S. companies going public by mid-August compared to just 8 in all of 2024. These offerings, spanning fintech, AI, healthcare, and space, raised nearly $86B at IPO price and most saw strong first-day gains, signaling renewed investor appetite. The rebound has eased a multi-year exit drought, providing liquidity to VCs and LPs while boosting confidence in future fundraising.

GPT-5’s launch highlighted the gap between lofty expectations and the practical realities of AI progress. While bold claims about AGI have been tempered, the real advances may lie in efficiency, cost, and usability rather than sudden leaps in intelligence. Much like electricity or the internet, the trajectory of AI is shaped by bottlenecks in compute, energy, supply chains, and adoption—with transformation unfolding gradually over time.

Augur VC has released Flight Deck, an open-source AI infrastructure financial model designed to unlock the Watt-Bit revolution at the intersection of energy and AI. Flight Deck serves as a pilot’s dashboard for navigating power and compute trade-offs, giving founders, financiers, and operators a common framework to make better infrastructure decisions. By open-sourcing it, Augur challenges the traditional gatekeeping model in venture capital and accelerates collaboration across the ecosystem. At Ventures Edge, we believe this underscores a simple truth: software is no longer a moat—interconnectivity is.